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<title>There's Nothing Like A Little Pain To Remind You You're Alive by ftlow</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29265078">There's Nothing Like A Little Pain To Remind You You're Alive</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftlow/pseuds/ftlow'>ftlow</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Challenge Yourself 2021 [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The 100 (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Descriptions of canonical violence, Sexual Content</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:33:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,016</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29265078</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftlow/pseuds/ftlow</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>You wonder if you could have loved him, on the Ark. You're sure you couldn't have. The Earth changed him, changed you all, and here you are now - together, scarred, but alive. You're just not sure whether love can exist here, either, or whether that too is something you left behind in space. Love seems fleeting, weak and tenuous in the wilderness you're trying to navigate now. The only thing that seems permanent is pain.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Abby Griffin/Marcus Kane</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Challenge Yourself 2021 [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2149554</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Fandoms Challenge 2021</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>There's Nothing Like A Little Pain To Remind You You're Alive</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>"Challenge Yourself" Week One - write a pairing you don't ship.<br/>Well, I love the chemistry of these two on screen, but I just can't bring myself to ship it. Too much happened between them before they got together. And I can't even write a happy fic for them! Interesting prompt though, and much harder than I imagined it would be.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>His hands are rough. You feel his fingertips scraping down your arms, his palms pressing to yours - the new puckered scars on his wrists meet your smooth, thin ones and make you shiver, and he wraps you in furs, mistaking it for cold. The covers are too soft, too gentle; you throw them off.<br/>
The Ark was angular, all clean lines and metal walls, echoing footsteps, monitoring systems. The Earth is softer and sharper, rounder, wilder; there’s no way of knowing what’s around the corner. Everything hurts down here.<br/>
You revel in the pain. <br/>
His beard scratches at your cheeks and your chin as you kiss him, hard, desperate. His teeth nip your lip, and - dry from the time under the influence of the chip, oblivious to the cracks forming - it splits; he smooths the damage with his tongue, and you bite back a cry, cursing silently as it stings. <br/>
The bruising around your neck, the burn from the rope, throbs as he drags his teeth and stubble over it. Tears form in your eyes and you blink them away, twisting to reach him. <br/>
The striped scars on your back pull uncomfortably. The fur you’re lying on is too gentle to irritate them, but they’ve healed ropily, mangled strips of skin tugging the surrounding smooth skin taught in odd places. Overstretching always hurts just a little. He comes willingly, though, and you don’t think he realises that the effort was painful. He covers your body with his, and you trace the puckered scars of his crucification. He smiles tremulously. <br/>
“We are so damaged now,” he murmurs. He shifts his weight and your knee - the one that the Mountain Men drilled into - protests; it creaks a lot since healing. His hand grips your hip, also drilled, and you swallow your protests as it throbs. <br/>
“We are,” you agree lightly, reaching up to kiss him and relishing the painful stretch of your neck. “But a wise man told me, in the rubble of Tondc, that our actions on the Ark readied us for it. We are drenched in the blood of those we floated.”<br/>
He is quiet, perhaps remembering lying in the pocket of air under tonnes of concrete, breathing in dust and facing his mortality. You can almost taste the dust now - thick and dry, coating the inside of your mouth, choking.<br/>
 “And yet, if we had floated no-one, we wouldn’t have survived this long,” he whispers, eyes unfocused, staring at something only he can see. “There is always a choice, but sometimes, both options are bad.” He looks down at you and bites his lip, eyes softening with regret. “Like shock-lashing you,” he says, his voice even quieter.<br/>
You swallow down the accusation that he enjoyed it, that the Marcus from the Ark was constantly looking for a way to get one up on you, and shrug lightly. “The past is behind us. Let’s focus on surviving the future,” you whisper. <br/>
He trails his hands down your bare torso, fingernails scratching. They dig into your stripes of scar tissue when you flip him onto his back and straddle his hips; you can’t help crying out, but he only grips harder to your hips, perhaps mistaking it for a cry of pleasure. His fingers splay across the small of your back, tightening painfully. Your knee takes most of your weight as you lean down to him and it protests, pain spiking up your femur; the sound of a drill starts in your head. You reach blindly for his chest, and run your fingers through the blanket of hair there, lower, lower - drowning out the drilling with his moans. </p><hr/>
<p>By the time you both still, your hip is aching from the movements you made, the way you rocked and gyrated atop him; the half-moon fingernail marks in your back are scattered across smooth and scarred skin, and some burn more sharply than others. This afterglow feels heavy; you carry its weight somewhere low in your chest, as if your heart has become displaced, even as your stomach fizzes with the after effects.<br/>
You almost don’t put your necklace back on, afterwards. Your neck is smarting, your throat burning, from stretching and arching into his touch, from calling out. <br/>
You aren’t sure what the marks look like now, or if they’re even still visible, but he had covered them with a large hand to hold you still; his touch was gentle, but commanding, and you had hated being controlled, even as you revelled in the pain his heavy hand brought on your bruised throat. <br/>
Adding the bite of the thin chain, the emotional weight of Jake’s wedding ring, seems too far.<br/>
He stops you from leaving without it, though. “Jake is a part of who you are,” he whispers, and you let him put the cold chain around your neck. The roughness of your shirt compared to the soft furs you were lying on irritates the scars on your back and you stand, making your excuses.<br/>
You had kissed him for hope, once upon a time. Seeing him change, and become a man of peace, brought you hope, and the changed Marcus evidently holds you in more esteem than the Marcus of old. <br/>
He is scarred, now, as you all are, by the toll of the last few years. But you can’t forget your biggest scar of all: losing Jake. <br/>
Now you kiss him for penance; you kiss him to remind yourself how different he is to the man you loved, and who fathered your child, and who tried so hard to do the right thing. You kiss him to remind yourself that it was you who betrayed Jake, and you who gave Clarke every excuse to hate you. <br/>
You kiss him because it hurts, and you need it to hurt - you need a reminder that you’re still alive, and ALIE is gone. The City of Light was beautiful, you allow yourself to admit it - but Jake wasn’t there. And you’d forgotten him. <br/>
You kiss Marcus to remind yourself of him, and everything he was that Marcus is not. </p>
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